SVALCLIME – Targeting deep-time Arctic climate archives of Svalbard
- 1Kiel University, Institute of Geoscience, Kiel, Germany (denise.kulhanek@ifg.uni-kiel.de)
- 2Geological Institute, RWTH-Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
- 3Umeå University, Department of Ecology and Environmental Science (EMG), Umeå, Sweden
- 4Centre for Polar Ecology, University of South Bohemia, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic
- 5Institute of Geology, Department of Earth System Sciences, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
- 6Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Geophysics, Bremerhaven, Germany
- 7Department of Geosciences, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
- 8Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
- 9Volcanic Basin Energy Research, Oslo, Norway
- 10Department of Arctic Geology, University Centre in Svalbard, Longyearbyen, Norway
- 11Centre for Planetary Habitability (PHAB), Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
- 12Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia
- 13Department of geo-energy and -storage, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), Copenhagen, Denmark
- 14Department of Geoscience and Petroleum, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
- 15Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Yale University, New Haven, United States
- 16Centre for Planetary Habitability (PHAB), University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
- 17School of Earth Sciences, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
- 18Centre d’Applications et de Recherches en Télédétection (CARTEL), Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke (Québec), Canada
The Svalbard archipelago, located in the Norwegian High Arctic, preserves more than 650 million years of near-continuous sedimentary rock records spanning from the Neoproterozoic to the Cenozoic. The polar paleogeographic location of Svalbard in the late Mesozoic and the Cenozoic makes sites in Svalbard unique amongst well-studied temporally equivalent successions from lower paleolatitudes, allowing investigation of the polar amplification climatic effect over geological time. The sedimentary record of Svalbard has been largely controlled by northward drift of constituent geological provinces throughout much of the Phanerozoic and evolving tectono-stratigraphic environments including the influence of several Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs) and global climate fluctuations.
The SVALCLIME initiative aims to systematically drill and core the sedimentary successions in Svalbard. Two sub-projects currently being evaluated by the ICDP materialized from an international workshop held in Longyearbyen in October 2022. The first is a full ICDP proposal focused on hyperthermals from the Permian to Paleogene (SVALCLIME P2P) and an ICDP-IODP Land to Sea preproposal on hothouse to coldhouse transitions in the late Paleozoic and across the Eocene–Oligocene transition (SVALCLIME Hot2Cold).
The SVALCLIME P2P project aims to investigate the high-resolution Arctic paleoclimate record from 255 to 45 Ma onshore Svalbard that encompasses several Mesozoic and Cenozoic hyperthermal events and the near-field impacts of three LIPs (the Siberian Traps, the High Arctic LIP and the North Atlantic Igneous Province). Our focus will also be on the deep biosphere to uncover the relationship between mineral substrates and taxonomic and metabolic diversity of intraterrestrial microbiomes. We propose to core seven boreholes at three locations (Nordenskiöldfjellet, Botneheia and Kropotkinfjellet), with a cumulative total cored length of ~3.4 km.
The SVALCLIME Hot2Cold project aims to address global transitions from hothouse to icehouse conditions during the late Paleozoic and the Eocene to Oligocene. In the preproposal we identify suitable drill sites both onshore and offshore to characterize these periods. The Forlandsundet Graben in western Spitsbergen offers an opportunity to decipher the evolution of the Fram Strait and its impact on global oceanographic circulation during the Eocene–Oligocene transition. The Upper Carboniferous to Early Permian syn and post-rift deposits of the Billefjorden Trough will be targeted to investigate >130 cyclothems originating from glacioeustatic sea level fluctuations.
In this contribution, we outline the background and motivation of the SVALCLIME initiative and present the scientific objectives and the proposed drill sites.
How to cite: Kulhanek, D. K., Zuchuat, V., Jones, M., Barta, J., Foster, W. J., Geissler, W. H., Grundvåg, S.-A., Lorenz, H., Planke, S., Senger, K., Shepherd, G., Sliwinska, K. K., Smyrak-Sikora, A., Tarhan, L. G., Vickers, M., Weber, M., Xu, W., and Kramer, D.: SVALCLIME – Targeting deep-time Arctic climate archives of Svalbard, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-14690, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-14690, 2024.
